NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
It's Moon-landing Monday
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Jul 20, 04:35 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Jul 20, 04:35 -0700
To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, I propose a navigation brain game... You are on your way to the Moon in the year 2029, sixty years after the first moon landing, to begin a six-month stay as part of a team of five at the tiny "International Moon Base". You have been granted a twenty kilogram allowance for personal effects, and navigation-fanatic that you are, you have chosen to bring along a beautiful, well-adjusted, perfectly-aligned, traditional marine sextant manufactured way back in 1999. You also carry a laptop computer in a radiation and EMP-shielded case containing whatever databases of astronomical information suit your fancy (you've got at least a terabyte to spare so have no fear --if you can imagine it, you can load it on that laptop!). Then, just six hours out of Earth orbit on-course for the Moon, in a terrible accident, a solar flare, or an electrical fault, or just plain old gremlins wipe out your spacecraft's electronics leaving you no navigational capabilities, no automated spacecraft control, no communications with the Earth or GPS-like satellites or any astronauts in Earth orbit, lunar orbit, or already on the Moon. Life-support is functioning for a few days, and you can still fire your rockets and thrusters manually, but everything else is dead. So what could you do? You dig out your sextant from your luggage... You fire up your laptop with its detailed databases of astronomical data... Can you get to the Moon? If not to the Moon's surface, can you get yourself to within, let's say, 100 nautical miles of some spot in lunar orbit? In short, could you become "Buck Bowditch in the 25th Century" and use traditional celestial navigation tools and skills, plus a laptop full of data and software, to save you and your comrades? Just to make things specific, your job is to fire your rockets at their standard thrust along a vector pointed at 6 hours RA and 20 degrees Declination (+/- 0.1 degrees in both coordinates) at an exact specified distance of 900 miles (+/-10 miles) from the Moon's surface on your current trajectory. If you do that, you will be able to rendezvous with an orbiting rescue spacecraft and win the game. Ready to go?? :-) -FER PS: The spacecraft's windows are just windows. They are not optically flat. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NavList message boards: www.fer3.com/arc Or post by email to: NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---